Part 10 (1/2)
Bad hygiene is something more than exposure to bad air, poor food, contaminated water, etc. It includes habits and times of eating, attention to the bowels, outdoor exercise, sleep, and in the marital state it includes the s.e.xual indulgence.
The housewife under consideration, Mrs. T.F., aged twenty-eight, married five years, two children, complained mainly of headache, occasional dizziness, great irritability, and fatigue, so that quarrels with her husband were very common, though there seemed nothing to quarrel about.
The family was not rich, but lived in a comfortable apartment; there were no serious financial burdens, the children were reasonably healthy and good, and the closest questioning revealed the husband as a kindly man who never took the initiative in quarrels but who was never able to keep silent under provocation. The couple was still in love and there seemed to be no essential incompatibility.
Questioned as to her habits, Mrs. F. said she did all her own housework except the was.h.i.+ng and ironing and scrubbing. She had a little girl three times a week to take the baby out. Before marriage she had been a stenographer, but never earned high pay and had no love for her work. In fact she gave it up with relief and found housework with its disagreeable features much more to her taste than business. She had been of a placid, pleasant temperament and could not understand the change in her.
Since all this did not explain her symptoms, closer inquiry was made into her habits. She arose with her husband at seven-thirty, prepared his breakfast, sent the oldest child off to kindergarten and then had her own breakfast, which usually consisted of toast and coffee. At noon she had a very small piece of meat or an egg and a few potatoes with tea. At night she ate sparingly of the dinner, which usually was meat, potatoes, another vegetable, and a dessert. Her husband here stated that she ate at this meal less than the boy of four and a half.
Comparing her buxom figure with the diet a discrepancy was at once apparent. She then confessed with shame that she was a constant nibbler, eating a bit of this or that every half hour or so, and consequently never had an appet.i.te. The food thus nibbled usually was either spicy or sweet, and she consumed quite a bit of candy. Her bowels moved infrequently and she always needed laxatives. In her spare time she felt rather ”logy”, rarely went out, except now and then at night with her husband, and spent her leisure hours on the couch reading or nibbling.
This in itself would have quite explained much of her trouble. It has been pointed out that body and mind are not separable; that mental functions are based on the bodily functions, and that mood may rest on no more exalted cause then the condition of the bowels. But a more intimate questioning revealed s.e.xual habits which are easily drifted into by people of an amorous turn of character and who are really fond of one another. These both husband and wife frankly said they had not meant to speak of, but with their disclosure it was evident that a good deal of importance was to be attached to them.
The correction of the life habits was of course the fundamental need.
The young woman was instructed in detail as to diet, the care of the bowels and outdoor exercise. Since she was in perfect condition except for stoutness she could easily look for recovery, and as an added incentive the restoration of youthful good looks was held out as certain.
The s.e.xual life was frankly discussed, and necessary restrictions were imposed. Both the husband and wife agreed willingly to the changes ordered and promised faithfully to carry out instructions.
The patient made a splendid recovery and very rapidly. Here was a deenergization dependent solely upon the sedentary life of the housewife and upon ignorance of s.e.x hygiene. Here were quarreling and impending marital disaster removed by attention to details in living. Here was a complete proof that not only does a sound mind need a sound body, but that a sound marriage needs one as well.
Case V. The hyperaesthetic woman.
Mrs. J.F. is twenty-seven years of age. She was born in the United States, of middling well-to-do people. Her father was a gruff, hearty man, not in the least bit finicky, who really despised manners and the like, though he was conventional enough in his own way. Her mother was an old-fas.h.i.+oned housewife, fond of her home and family, in fact perhaps more attached to the former than the latter. She hated servants and got along without them (except for a day woman) until she became rather too old to do the work.
J.'s sister and two brothers were duplicates of the parents,--hearty, stolid, and remarkably plain looking. J., the younger sister, though not the youngest in the family, was as different from her family as if she had sprung from another stock. She was slender, very pretty, with a quick, alert mind which jumped at conclusions, because labored a.n.a.lysis fatigued it. Above all, from the very start of life she was sensitive to a degree that perplexed her family, who were however intensely sympathetic because they adored her. This adoration arose from the fact that J. was brighter and prettier than most of her friends, and that her cleverness in many directions--music, writing, talking, handiwork--was the talk of their little group.
This sensitiveness arose from two main factors. First, an egoism fostered by the wors.h.i.+p of her friends and the leaders.h.i.+p of her group,--an egoism which led her to regard as a sort of insult anything disagreeable. Accustomed to praise, the least criticism implied or outspoken cut like a knife; accustomed to being waited upon, she resented physical discomfort of the slightest kind. Second, there must also have been an actual physical sensitiveness to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. that made her perceive what others failed to notice. This led to an artistry manifested by her nice work in music and decoration and also by an excessive displeasure at the inartistic.
With this training, experience, and natural temperament she should have married a rich collector of art products, who would have added her to his collection and cherished her as his most fragile possession.
Instead, through the working of that strange law of contraries by which Nature strikes averages between extremes, she fell in love with a hulk of a man whose ideas on art were limited to calling a picture ”pretty”, who loved sports and the pleasures of the table, and whose business motto was ”Beat the other guy to it.” A successful man, troubled with few subtleties either of approach or conscience, he viewed the marriage relations.h.i.+p in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way and the new American indulgence. A man's wife was to be given all the clothes she wanted, servants to help run the home, ought to bear two or three children, and love her indulgent husband. As for any real intimacy, he knew nothing of it.
Kindly, self-indulgent, wife-indulgent, child-indulgent, ruthless in business, he may stand as something America has produced without any effort.
From the very first night J.'s world was shattered. We need not enter into details in this matter, but a woman of this type needs finesse in the initiation into marriage more than at any other time. Cave-man style outraged her every fiber, and the man was dumbfounded at her reaction.
Though he tried to make amends his very effort and lack of understanding complicated matters.
Aside from this matter, which in the course of time became adjusted, so that though she rebelled desire arose in her, she found herself at odds with her husband's tastes and conduct in little things. Though his table manners were good enough, the gusto of his eating annoyed her and took away her own appet.i.te. When they went to a play together the coa.r.s.e jokes and the plainly sensuous aroused his enthusiasm. He lacked subtlety and could not understand the ”finer” things of life. As he grew settled in matrimony, which he enjoyed in spite of her nerves (which he took for granted as like a woman), he grew stouter and this irritated and jarred her.
She finally realized she no longer loved him. It is doubtful if she realized this before the birth of her first and only child. She lacked maternal feeling and rebelled with a bitter rebellion against the distortion of her figure that came with the pregnancy. The nursing ordered by the doctor and expected by all around her nearly drove her ”wild”, she said, for she felt like a ”cow”, a ”female.” Indeed she reacted bitterly against the femaleness that marriage forced on her and hated the essential maleness of her husband. Her emotional reaction against nursing took away her milk, and finally the disgusted family doctor ordered the baby weaned and he was turned over to a servant.
She went back to her own life, determined to become a housewife, to see if she could not love her husband and her home. But everything he did irritated her, and everything in the house made her feel as in a ”luxurious cage.” Yet she was by no means a feminist; she detested ”noisy suffragettes”, thought women doctors and lawyers ridiculous, and had been brought up to regard marriage as indissoluble.
Gradually out of the conflict, the chilling fear that she had made a mistake which could not be rectified, the constant irritation and annoyances, the revolt against her own s.e.x feeling and her life situation, arose the neurosis. It took the form mainly of sudden unaccountable fears with faint dizzy feelings. The family physician on the aside told me that it was ”just a case of a d.a.m.n fool woman with everybody too good to her.”
What const.i.tutes a ”d.a.m.n fool” will include every person in the world, according to some one else. It seemed obvious to me that J. was not meant by nature to be a housewife or any kind of wife. Matrimonially she was a misfit, unless she met some man of a type like herself, though I doubt if any man could have pleased her. I doubt if her over-exacting taste would not rebel against the animal in life itself. For though the animal of life is essentially as fine as the human, certain types find it impossible to acknowledge it in themselves.
At any rate I advised separation for a time,--six months at least. I told the woman her reaction to her husband was abnormal and finicky. She answered that she knew this but could not conceive of any change. We discussed the matter in all its ramifications, and though she and her husband agreed to the separation, I knew that he was determined to hold her to her contract. She improved somewhat but I believe that such a temperament is incompatible with marriage, at least to such a man. The outlook is therefore a poor one.
Case VI. The over-conscientious housewife,--the seeker of perfection.